One thing I have been struggling with for the last months is to choose the right name for my startup and future business. Given that I will probably be using the same name for my company for a long time and build a whole brand based on that name I consider this quite an important decision. As this is probably an important topic for anyone looking to start their own business I will try to explain a few techniques I have used, some thoughts that came up during this process and the key criteria I have found to be important when choosing a name for a business.

(more…)

Category: Creativity by Stefan | 4 Comments »

I recently watched a video of Josh Petersen talking at the Seattle Startup Day 2009 where he mentioned the concept of finding business ideas by solving your own problems. When I thought about this concept I realized that this is quite a powerful but simple method which I have already used many times without even being aware of. When I started my first project Movie-Trade in 2001 I just solved my own problem because I wanted to show people a list of movies I owned but excel or word files were just so damn inconvenient. Josh explains in his talk that by solving their own problems the founders of startups/projects like Basecamp (www.basecamphq.com) and Ruby on Rails (www.rubyonrails.org) found their (business) ideas. Pretty simple but very effective. (more…)

Category: Business Ideas, Creativity by Stefan | 1 Comment »